Domain: geekaustin.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to geekaustin.org.
Comments · 170
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Re:Uh, Ok....
yah, but hopefully your wristwatch is a single-user system...
;-)
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Re:Patch...
Wrong. There is already a version with an OpenBSD rootkit.
Version of the worm? Version of BIND vulnerable to the worm? Version of OpenBSD with a vulnerable version of BIND?
Anyway, I'm not suprised OpenBSD can get rooted by a vulnerable service. Once you get inside OpenBSD's (admittedly very hard) shell, it's about as easy to get root as with any other unix-derivitive (i.e. not trivial usually but not impossible either).
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Re:regardless...
These "people" are you and me, the admins. This problem is clearly the admin's fault.
Note that I was talking about newbies in the majority of my post. Newbie admins are still newbies. And yes, I still think the distro makers are partly to blame, in that even the slickest installer isn't going to protect you from your own ignorance (e.g. "workstation" installations that install BIND, "server" installations that install basically every service, etc.). No distro maker can prevent newbie admins from shooting themselves in the foot, but at least they can try to make sure the newbies aren't covered in gasoline and handed a cigarette to smoke...
Not trying to flame here, but your ranting sounds like the parents who blame high-school shootings on video games and movies, when they should be pointing in the mirror.
Professionalism is an inherent requirement to do well as an admin. My post however was directed at the person who just picked "everything" on a RH install whilst trying linux for the first time with their cable-modem-connected-and-no-firewall machine... For that person the distro makers do need to be very conservative with what they install by default and/or configure to be open to the world by default. Linux companies could definitely take a page from OpenBSD in this regard.
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Re:Not an option for some of us
Well, just make sure a) SSH is something recent (recent openssh, or the "commercial" ssh which is free to edu users), and b) ftp is recent and/or a version intended to be secure (wuftpd has problems, and is one of the more common daemons; also look into scp and/or sftp with SSH).
I've heard of problems with portmap, but I don't have to admin it (no NFS/NIS in the last few environments where I've worked). This is something I'd track down an expert at your university to ask about...
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Re:regardless...
Look into the Bastille project (search freshmeat). It's intended to run on a virgin install IIRC, fixes security holes and tells you what it's doing and why.
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Re:Use DJBDNS instead of BIND.
This implies that the small utilities do that one thing really well. Well, I suppose svscan does one thing really well: generate MB/sec of error messages when it sees something it doesn't like, something trivial like a wrongly-named directory or a rightly-named directory in the wrong place. Seriously, it's like it was coded to stress-test syslog so it has zero error checking...
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Re:Use DJBDNS instead of BIND.
DJBDNS is ok, but I found it somewhat balky to install. This seems to be a frequent DJB-derived-software complaint of mine, I don't like having to install two or three or more packages to get one simple thing like mini-dns to work (I _really_ don't like svscan, for example).
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regardless...
You probably shouldn't be running bind (or anything else). Linux's security problems are almost always created by people leaving stuff up/on/open when they don't need to.
If you're a newbie, here's a partial list of things you don't need to install or have running on your new workstation: bind/named, any form of mail server (esp. sendmail), atd, smbd/nmbd (samba), inetd, any form of ftp daemon (wuftpd, et al.), NFS/NIS/portmap, basically anything that provides a service to the outside world. Machines on "always-on" connections and not behind firewalls are of course the most vulnerable...
The best policy is offering nothing, and only selectively opening up services as you need to. If you do have a machine that needs to provide a service, try to understand the service and the idiosyncracies of the server program before you offer it, and keep tabs on updates...
Insert standard "wish-the-distros-would-wise-up-and-ship-closed-b
y -default-installations" thought here...
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Re:Linux Terminal Server Project
Or if you don't mind a minimal window manager just use a 486 (80+ MHz is probably best). Most 486en don't need cpu fans, a good heatsink will do. Heck, I've run a p150 without a fan on it's (quite large) heatsink and it was ok (note that it was originally designed this way, that MB and cpu came out of a name-brand PC).
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what the heck do they still make?! :)
I swear it seems they've spun off or canceled everything they once made (palm pilots, modems, IAs, etc. didn't they spin off or cancel their network infrastructure stuff too (switches et al.)?). What do they still sell?!
;-)
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how do you auction off an email?
Is it on a disk? What format? Did they print it out? Is it on acid free paper? etc. etc.
WRT the freedom of information act and the bill of rights protections against self incrimination or unreasonable searches and seizures, the impression I've gotten in the law class I'm taking (in theory business law but the prof is really cool so we end up debating all sorts of legal topics, you gotta love arguing the validity of things like the DMCA in a class situation[1]) is that as a _person_ you have those protections, as an _institution_ you do not. So Bush's love letter to his wife or birthday card to his daughter are not FOIA fair game, but his email _as the incarnation of the institution of the American presidency_ is. (Leaving aside my personal views regarding his _extreme_ lack of aptitude for the office, unfortunately we're stuck with that cromag for the next few years...)
[1]I'm a computational chem major, but I'm eclectic. eh, you have to have some way to squander your youth, I picked college...
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ask the cubans about our 1890s era inwardness
I'd say the Spanish-American war was pretty outwardly directed foreign policy.
;-) Not that I'm saying it was right, but it was outward...Sweetie, you're living in a city that is in no way cosmopolitan. Not even close. Live in LA or NYC or Houston before you decide all of america is comprised of close-minded, mom-and-apple-pie hicks. There are places in Houston where the street signs are in 3 languages, and english is last on the list...
As far as american culture as a whole, well I agree most of it is pretty homogenized. Why most people here like that pap (*NSUCK, BACKDOOR BOYS, McFuckingDonalds, or any of the 1,001 romantic comedies (all of which are as funny as a root canal and about as romantic as a sandpaper dildo), etc. ad nauseum) is beyond me. Why the rest of the world is so enamored of that crap is even further beyond me. I think that basically, most people are stupid. The genius of american mainstream culture is that they learned how to sell stuff to idiots, cretins, and slack-jawed droolers of all stripes as efficiently as possible, and this works as well with Scottish retards as it does American or Japanese or ($COUNTRY) ones... Why bother being creative when you can capture 90% of the global market with cheap, tawdry, talentless crap?
Oh well, at least for every ten (thousand) boy bands we have a Hemingway or Poe.
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Re:Give me a break
In case you were thinking that this is somehow a "win" (whatever that is) for Linux, think again: They are going to home-grow their secure solutions using a German software company.
Hmmm, ever heard of SuSE? Nothing stops them from making a DGSE-linux in cooperation with SuSE, sort of analogous to the NSA's security enhanced linux... (Was DGSE the german foreign intelligence agency or do I even have the right country? oh well, what ever acronym is right the point is the same) Now does this mean that they'll release a new linux binary called
/usr/local/bin/sniffgermansecrets? doubt it. but if they find and release fixes for kernel bugs and whatnot, hey, that's a win...
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increased software efficiency by...
involving the government. riiiiiiight....
Seriously, as long as software companies emphasize release date and features over correctness and user testing, bugginess will be the norm. Financial penalties are warranted and effective for some industries (e.g. automotive, where bugs in the system cause fatalities), but unless the software you're making has life-or-death failure consequences it probably doesn't warrant that level of intervention (and nobody ever died becuase Windows crashed while they were playing Quake).
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not quite, some innovation takes wads o' cash
I think more accurate would be to say that the emphasis on monetization is what slows down innovation. Money itself is a neccessary prerequisite to innovation in many fields (just as one example, organic chemistry labs are incredibly expensive in terms of reagent costs and instrumentation (figure USD500K+ for a good NMR alone)). CS is one of a very few fields where fundamental revolutions can take place with just one person's thoughts in their head and minimal bucks for some computer hardware to realize the implementation (c.f. Berners-Lee and the web), mathematics would be another (there all you need is one brilliant person and some paper and pencils
;-) ).
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Re:Be realistic
Each congresscritter gets some set amount of funding per year to maintain his or her office staff. Last year I have information on (1989, came across it by random chance, haven't been curious enough to find out more recently), the total staff salary was on the order of $400K, which sounds like a lot but a small congressperson's office probably employs 8-12 people (head AA, 2 or 3 other office people that handle mundanities and snail mail, staff in the home district, etc.). Simply put, they may not have the budget to dedicate 2+ more people to something as ephemeral as email.
Of course, they could get interns, but a) there are only so many unpaid interns available, and b) unpaid interns and politicians are a potentially unstable mix...
;-)
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coffee houses and bookstores
or movie places (the art houses and dinner theaters) or libraries or college classes or
... basically any place where the intellectual pursuits in life are being practiced.Keep in mind that your potential SO may not be a "geek" in the stringing-cat5-and-playing-quake sense, but if they are intellectual people then at least you have something to build a relationship on (that being good conversations and other intellectual stimulation; my fiancee has taught me all sorts of cool language and culture and history things, and in turn she's learned stuff from me like regular expressions, the foundation of a relationship is not what you get from it but what you give, but that's another topic). Remember to be yourself, don't do something "just becuase chicks dig it". That way when you do meet the person of your dreams, you'll genuinely have something in common.
But mainly, dude, make more than an hour a day into free time. No person is really going to fit into that sort of schedule, and no job is worth that much time.
(All these comments to be taken with a grain of salt, I'd be the last person to claim perfection in heart-related matters.)
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Re:As an alternate to RDMS
I thought that the 1,993 revision number jump was pretty impressive... (7 -> 2000)
;-)
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Re:Hello? Exchange rate doesn't matter!!!
well, you know us scientists and engineers, as soon as we hear a unit we look for a conversion factor or two...
;-)(you are absolutely right though about the exchange rate not meaning anything)
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Re:what is the exchange rate?
if the savings is a few hundred million pesos how much is that in dollars? Maybe 50 bucks?
Well, the peso isn't that bad.
;-) Here's a link to a universal currency converter I found via google (I don't know how up-to-the-second the rates are): www.xe.net/ucc/ . According to it 100,000,000 pesos is 10,449,320.79 USD, which is a non-trivial amount.One question that springs to mind is what distro they're planning on using. Connectiva seems likely becuase of it's internationalization for Spanish-speaking countries, but hey, maybe the head techie dude likes Slack...
:-)
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Re:Spoiled punks
Solid agreement here. Of course it's irony++ when the same people turn around and bitch about age discrimination.
:-/ Oh well, I console myself with the idea that when I'm old enough to have the kind of organizational clout they do, I'll remember how crappy these people's behavior was and do a better god damned job...
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Re:text of CDA as passed for reference
Well, it is a pretty big object, so I hope they passed by reference... And I hope some day we are free()'d from it's more odious clauses.
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text of CDA as passed for reference
To save people having to muck around on the thomas.loc.gov site too much (their search interface is horrid IMHO), here's a link to what I think (c.f. horrid interface again) is the final text of the CDA as passed. Of particular interest to this discussion would be Title II (common carrier crud) and Title V (things that excite senators,er, pr0n and stuff).
This is a big, complicated piece of legislation in which the laws of unintended consequences are in full force. That's why if you want to argue on it, you have to read the thing becuase there are so many little codiciles and amendments and stuff that what you think it says based on a soundbite level of knowledge and what it actually says may well be quite different (well, this is true of any legal discussion, but with complicated bills like this doubly so).
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one factor is code testing in a browser
Basically, NS 4.x is so different from the most commonly used web browser (IE of course) that testing the site with the browser you're clients will be using may well be what keeps you on win32. In addition to the obvious and extremely large differences in the DHTML arena, NS and particularly NS on linux just render shit differently. If your site designs are to a very tight tolerance in terms of appearance, this could become a huge pain in the ass.
Then again there is vmware to use IE. Or run it under wine. Or have the graphic designers/user interface designers stay on windows while the middle/back-end code monkeys move to linux.
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Re:yeah, just crack vmware
the only problem with sarcasm is that most people are too stupid to understand it
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yeah, just crack vmware
Just go to someplace like astalavista.box.sk a search for "vmware 2.0.3 linux" to find a crack for it.
:-) oh, and forget vmware if you have less than a 450 Mhz processor and 128 meg of ram.Or if you don't want to be an evil warez dood, just use something like vim/emacs for code editing. If you don't use raw code for sites anyway, well, linux ain't the OS for you. The JS debugging thing y ou can sort of mimic by turning on the javascript console in Netscape (javascript:console as a url in 4.x, maybe the same way in mozilla)
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UCITA is almost certain to pass here
Given that the majority of the congresscritters in the Lege are devoted to one thing and one thing only (namely "fostering a healthy biddness climate"), it's almost certain to pass in Texas[1]. This state has a long history of passing pretty much anything a business lobbyist asks for. If you need an example of this consider the grandfathering of pollution emitting plants that lead to things like the Alcoa smelter in Rockdale (one of the largest sources of airborne pollutants in texas and possibly the west becuase it has no pollution controls and burns lignite[2] at a prodigious rate; a few years back there was a ruckus over this and "something must be done!" so a "Strong Resolution" was passed that basically told the grandfathered plants they should clean up and if they didn't then the State would send them to their rooms without dessert.
:-( It's easy to get real mad if you're a texas liberal.).[1] the Lege and executive offices are all dominated by Republicans now, and even if it were the other way the Democrats here are usually so conservative they'd be Republicans anywhere else...
[2]lignite is a "soft" coal that's very common. Its main virtue is that it is cheap (easy to mine becuase it's close to the surface, and common). Its disadvantages are: it is close to the surface so usually it's strip mined, which has long-term negative effects on the local environment; and it is very high in sulfur content, the burning of which leads to SOx in the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas IIRC and also leads to the formation of acidic rainfall. The Rockdale smelter burns millions of tons of this crap every year.
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Re:Compaq
Compaq is based in Houston IIRC. Dell is based in Austin/Round Rock.
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non-collaboration policies are really dumb
I've studied CS in a collegiate environment (right now I'm a computational chemistry major, due to graduate RSN). I've also written code for a living in a corporate environment, working on some reasonably large projects.
Non-collaboration policies always struck me as really dumb becuase in the "real" world you don't take a dump without a) a plan, and b) at least one partner, much less write a line of code. Yes, I can see the educational value of learning to do something from scratch by yourself, but I also very strongly feel that collaboration should be an integral part of the learning experience, not a forbidden zone. The most frequent complaint I've heard about fresh CS/eng graduates is that they don't know how to work in a team, because their whole educational experience has been conducted in an environment that discouraged this.
If Brown has one of the top CS departments, I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with this policy, but rather with the caliber of faculty they attract (which is pretty much a function of how much they pay and how liberal they are with tenure). (I say if not becuase I doubt they're good, I just don't keep up on rankings.
:^) )
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It's about power, flexibility, and responsibility
Quite simply, (linux || unix)'s main virtues are power and flexibility. Taking advantage of either of these virtues requires that you as the user take the responsibility to understand what you are doing. In other words, as someone whose name I can't recall said: "Unix is hard to learn but easy to use, windows is easy to learn and hard to use." Another way to put it is that Unix is extremely user-friendly, but to a different set of users than windows or MacOS.
If you want simplicity of use (by that I mean pointy-clicky-screw-the-details) and you don't want all the microsoftian crud, take a look into BeOS (it retains much of the power and flexibility of linux but in a more "refined" user environment, IMHO). You can get pretty much the full OS for free (free.be.com IIRC). There are ways to install the free BeOS without a host operating system but Be, Inc. deserves your monetary support, because, again IMHO, their product is actually worth the price they're asking (something like $80 bundled with a tome and productivity suite, I think).
It is a common fallacy for a new user of linux/unix to compare it to some previous OS they used and say "linux needs X, Y, and Z to take over the world / survive". Linux/unix is perfectly well suited for the set of uses it is currently doing. These uses are generally not on the desktop or oriented at desktop users. If you want linux to fulfill some new role: easy, write code. Want linux in your wristwatch or on your mainframe or playing every new game that comes down the pike? Easy, just start or join a project to add features to the linux experience, and write code.
Semi-ranting aside, welcome to a new world. I hope you have fun (yes, the first 3-6 months are fustrating, but a whole world of potential is there if you stick with it).
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death + some lengthy time Re:Isaac Asimov...
The copyright on a written work stays active for something like 70 (or was it 120?) years after the author's death. The revenues go the author's family, and they can re-up the copyright IIRC. So for all practical purposes, under the current rules, copyright may as well never expire.
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This highlights some critical distinctions
... at least for me. I do support increased freedom of information (<-- preaching to the choir here, I know
;-) ), as it increases the rights I think that we all have as users of that information. Fair use is not a concept developed to deprive artists of fair revenue, but rather the fundamental concept of being able to derive reasonable benefit from an economic transaction.Still, I think that as users of information we do have the responsibility to make sure that fair use doesn't cross the line into outright piracy, for as Mr. Ellison is saying, this hurts the creators of the information. The grey areas I think pop up when middlemen try to appeal to the powers that be for increased protections in the name of the creators, when we all know that very rarely would any increased revenue end up in the hands of said creators (e.g. how many people believe that all of the blank audio media levy goes to the little bands who can't afford a stable of lawyers?)
In an ideal world there would be a simple and reliable method of direct (micro?)payment to a creator (in effect compensating them for a "viral" net-based distribution chain). In the real world, I suspect that the "free rider" problem will be a significant roadblock for some time to come ("free rider" refers to the cost of public works that are supposed to be user-supported from voluntary contributions, not everybody pays like they should).
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Re:I hope the rendering is improved...
Well, you can download the "web fonts" from microsoft. I forget the link, but it does make surfing using a free unix a bit nicer due to all the crappy web designers that automatically use font style=verbana whether they need to or not.
:-) See the howto that was called something like X11-Font-Deuglification for the link IIRC.
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Re:Uhm, yes.
I remember somebody once saying that the only difference between a highly classified intelligence report and the story about the same subject or event on CNN is that the intelligence report would have more names and more correlating data. Sounds plausible.
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Re:the goldenbeetle hack was cool
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the goldenbeetle hack was cool
Personally I thought they should have left it there, given it's apparent well-designed linkage. It'd make an interesting monument to human ingenuity as well as a slightly subversive statement regarding people being too uptight to see the humor in a VW bridge-dingleberry ("dingleberry- n. southern US slang, the little bits of fecal matter that stick to the fur/feathers of an animal's nether regions post-evacuation"). And hey, the beetle is also a nod to the counter-culture mecca SF was in the 60s.
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here's a link to an online book you NEED to read
it's quite informative (at least read the first chapter): SQL for Web Nerds by Philip Greenspun of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing fame.
Seriously, go read it. It's an afternoon well spent, in that hopefully after reading it you'll understand why comparing MySQL to Oracle is comedic. You have to understand your tools before you pick which one to use (MySQL is for your MP3 id3 tags, Oracle is for your hospital's data storage or for your credit card company's data storage.)
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postgres Re:Depends
Well, don't get me wrong, I love Postgres, but I doubt it could handle the transaction load of eBay. Further I doubt it could run on hardware robust enough to not instantly croak under the load (eBay's peripheral machines like webservers are all NT/2K (dumb IMHO), but the central database last I heard was pure oracle on solaris (and presumably one to several big Enterprise machines); I guess you could compile postgres on solaris, but would it be able to take advantage of the features of something like an E10K?).
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Re:Overrrated
It's when moderator N thinks moderators 0 through (N - 1) moderated your comment up too high. Sucks when you're at the auto-+1 stage (start at 2) and at max karma. If somebody thinks your comment is funny/informative/whatever, you gain no karma. If somebody then later disagrees with the first moderation(s), you _lose_ karma for the overated moderation. So this means that potential the math works like this: 50 + 3 - 1 = 49. Sucks. IMHO the overrated and underrated moderations should be removed, becuase their intent (discouraging unfair moderation) is aptly handled by meta-moderation.
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maxtor is stupid or hired stupid consultants
Well, I'm hardly the FreeBSD expert but a) I know it supports >2gb files, and b) I'm pretty sure daemons are either available or easily portable from linux to speak the Appletalk (assuming you use that flaming piece of crap network protocol for your macs instead of tcp/ip, I had to support macs in a heterogenous netowrk in two jobs and trust me, tcp/ip is the way to go) and Novell network filesystem protocols. WRT to the backup software stuff, please, there must be a $MAX_INT backup solutions providers that use or interface with UNIX (if it's good enough for NASA it's good enough for your salescritters).
I can only think that the decision process was influenced by M$ somehow (we'll take away support for you if you don't cooperate, we'l cut you a deal if you cooperate, we'll make a donation to the Maxtor Employee's Benevolents Fund it you cooperate, etc.), because I really don't think there is any technical validity to their decision...
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Re:Just goes to show you..
This just goes to show that the RIAA is always lying through their teeth when they way "We aren't concerned about casual copying. We are just trying to stop mass piracy."
Well, far be it from me to argue on the side of RIAA et al. (fuck them and their children in the ass) but I'll play the devil's advocate here.
This is intended to stop mass piracy. E.g. people making black-market copies of CDs and selling them en masse (like software pirates). Pirate sells disc for $5, makes huge profit, buyer gets perfect digital copy (presumably they'd print up labels and inserts too), musician gets zero (which is just slightly less than they get in the normal scenario after the record company fucks them). Just like software makers, they don't care if individual consumers' lives are made more complicated as long as they can zap the big counterfiters in places like SE Asia and central/south america (see the machine-locking of windows licenses on recent machines from places like Dell).
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Re:journalistic focus is mostly audience-driven
Well, yeah, I acknowledge a slight bias in assuming the person I was responding to was in America (I'm in America).
:-) I admit that being in a given locality of a major story will tend to make you be more interested in it.
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Re:Wireless vehicle...
You could already do this I suppose using the already-extant satellite internet access systems. But why would you want to if you live in range of the MAN? Yes, the bandwidth is about the same, but your latency will be MUCH less than to a satellite transceiver (the difference it take an EM wave to travel from car to city 10 miles distant and back (way shorter than you'd notice) compared to from your car to orbital bird and back (quarter second and up depending on altitude)). Wouldn't matter for email and web surfing probably but net games and remote shelling would really be feeling the difference.
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train Re:Is this a killer app for the car?
As long as your train is mostly above-ground it'd be easy to mount a transceiver on the train, and then have a LAN on the train (data port on every seat or something, or in special "commuters who like to work" cars that cost a few bucks extra to defer the cost of the modification). Short tunnels could be fixed with rebroadcasters, longer ones with beefier ones. If the tunnel is through something like a mountain you'd probably need a rebroadcaster on the opposite-from-MAN side anyway.
It would be especially nice if they included a three-pronger AC outlet with each ethernet port. Gotta figure, a few dozen laptops would be a negligible power drain compared to an electric turbine powerful enough to move n tons of train + people + cargo... If you're using a gas/diesel turbine you probably have power to spare to run a small generator anyway (and probably are already doing so for the electrical subsystem on the train).
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work/data sites Re:Mobile office
Well, the majority of work data pulled from the intra/inter-net via the web probably has a pretty plain interface to begin with. I mean, how fat does a web2ldap address book need to be? (this is not to say some idiot hasn't done it with a big Flash movie calling data URLs, but hopefully that doesn't happen often). Similarly, news clippings (like for the journalist), stock quotes / business documents, scientific data (interfaces to a LIMS), etc. are all pretty simple, mostly textual data. Even if you tart it up a bit with a few pictures that doesn't change the inherently textual and thus fundamentally low bandwidth nature of the data.
And of course if you're using the wireless bandwidth for a terminal interface (shell access to data, company mail or news, company internal IRC network, etc.), it's probably 28.8 kbps at a max. (of course if you're a looooooong way from the transceiver the lag would be a bitch
;-) (rsh'ing from the moon would suck...))
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Re:Here's a new idea for an in-car activity...
Do you by any chance live in Austin, TX?
:-) (can't count the number of times I've seen some lady driving the youth soccer league around in her suburan attack/utility vehicle while using both hands to talk to two people on two cell phones (at least by the way she goes from lane 0 to lane n at high speed and random intervals))
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org -
could be Re:Is this really a good thing?
Well, hopefully the terminal would be on the passenger side and be engineered such that (s)he couldn't reach the keyboard or easily see the screen. Yes, the only damn thing you should be doing if you're in the driver's seat is driving.
:-)Now if you have a passenger, I can see this as being a good thing. The web term would keep them from bugging you while you keep yout eyes on the road (hey, ideal world), and if you forgot a map, they can still play navigator for you using a map website. And if you have a kid up there they can be kept from asking the Dread Question (namely: "while(1) { printf("Are we there yet?!\n");}") by giving them some URLS to pr0n...
;-)
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org -
journalistic focus is mostly audience-driven
Come on, which (made-up) news story would you read/watch/listen to first (i.e. pay the most attention and therefor generate the most potential sales to advertisers):
- Arab-Isreali Conflict Intensifies
- Indian Factions Settle Differences
The media will always focus on what is bad and/or exceptional before it focuses on what is good or normal becuase that attracts more attention ("1 Dead in Schoolbus Collision" vs. "37 Survive Schoolbus Collision" or "17000 cars didn't collide on day of schoolbus collision").
[1] My fiancee recently received her Bachelors in Journalism and derived particular black humor from a quote to this effect from somebody like Cronkite or Murrow. Apparently said to a junior reporter, paraphrased it was something like "Never forget that all you are is filler in between advertisements."
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org -
argh! I know the perfect place but can't recall...
I swear I just (like three days ago) came across this place that basically did everything you're asking for. They would take a master from the musician, along with digitized cover/insert material, and when an order came in, they would burn a Redbook CD copy of the master, stick it in a case with the printed cover and insert, and handle the shipping/billing. At the end of the month, musician gets a check for that month's sales minus their fees (it was linked to from
/. I _think_ and the person linking to it was a musician using the service, saying inpassing that the fees were very reasonable). The problem is that I've been racking my brain for about 5 minutes now and I can't recall their URL. :-( Oh well, at least take solace that someone is out there on the net offering what you want (try google for "redbook fullfilment" or something I guess). Sorry to be so vague...
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Re:Black background web pages
Pick up any book on graphic design (by that I mean stuff like page layout). Any college of journalism will have at least one course on this (and by extension the college bookstore(s) will have the texts). My fiancee recently got her journalism degree (concentration in magazine design), so I've absorbed some of this stuff over her shoulder.
One book I got that does a pretty good job of explaining this stuff to amateurs is The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (1994, Peachpit Press; $10.50 at www.bookpool.com). See specifically chapters 7 through 9 (the "Designing with type" section).
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org